Rensselaer

One of our favorite road names in the Capital District (and a favorite road for cycling) is Blue Factory Road. It is named not for a factory that was blue, but for a factory that made blue. Before the age of synthetic colors (in which a Rensselaer factory played a significant role), colorants primarily came …

We outlined how the original thought to move Albany’s railroad station to Rensselaer turned into a part of the overall plan to run the interstate along the river. Since the train station moved, the complaining about it has rarely stopped. Even now that the new facility is considerably better appointed than the old box of …

Okay, admittedly, our headline from yesterday was a bit of hyperbole. Of course, the Penn Central Railroad didn’t ruin everything, although it didn’t help many things either. But a commenter noted that they were really just finishing the work the New York Central had started, in the face of the fairly catastrophic decline in both …

Those who remember Albany’s Union Station as a glorious destination in the ’50s and ’60s most likely benefit from the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia. A 1969 column in the Knickerbocker News acknowledged that “In its dying days, Albany’s Union Station was an odiferous and dingy cavern, but still, if you looked hard, you could see …

In river towns, people would occasionally fall into the river and drown. So it only makes sense that in 1902, the newly consolidated city of Rensselaer proposed to have three life-saving stations along the riverfront, as outlined in the Albany Evening Journal of July 15: Rensselaer is soon to have three life saving stations. One …

Checking through the Library of Congress collection on Flickr, we ran across this 1911 photo published by Bain News Service, marked “Morner House Near Albany.” If it looks like there was quite a hubbub going on at the Morner house, well, there was. For starters, “near Albany” is relative; Bain also described the house as …

While we were digging around the “Personal Pages” from a 1919 edition of Textile World, our curiosity was piqued by this note on the generosity of William Barnet, perhaps Rensselaer’s leading shoddy manufacturer. (Hoxsie will always find “shoddy manufacturer” funny, but if you don’t know, shoddy was a cheap fabric made of short-fibered reclaimed wool.) …

As we were running down a little bit of information on Rensselaer’s Huyck Felt Mill, once one of the principal employers in that railroad town (other than the railroads, of course), we came across this little snippet from a 1919 edition of Textile World. A section called “The Personal Page” highlighted notable events in the …

For those of you not old enough to have searched through newspaper classifieds looking for work, you probably wouldn’t know that the Help Wanted sections were strictly divided by sex. From 1946, this help wanted ad wasn’t in any way unusual for the time, from Huyck’s Mill in Rensselaer, advertising any number of positions open …

Most things on Hoxsie are found when we’re looking for other things. This is one of those things: while searching for some background on the Albany and Hudson Railroad, we came across a brief mention in the San Francisco Call of May 17, 1907 of the murder of the railroad’s chief electrician, Alonzo Hewitt. Turns …